Chapter 120: Hack and Slash
Chapter 120: Hack and Slash
But thinking about it, he could not be certain that the company that made Diablo existed in this world. And the company that originally made Diablo had been acquired by Blizzard after suffering financial difficulties. Even if it did exist, there was a high chance it had failed before surviving until now.
And even if it somehow survived without failing, Diablo was still a turn-based game before Blizzard gave advice, wasn’t it?
Even if he found it by some miracle, they would have to start planning again from now anyway. Insu tapped his forehead while thinking, then suddenly realized something.
Should I just make it myself?
The timing was not bad. TLF Online would be focused on stabilization work for a while anyway, and even aside from that, he planned to focus more on planning and directing than direct development from now on, so he had enough room to develop one game.
They also had funds now that TLF Online had launched successfully, and WET’s advertising rates had risen considerably, bringing in a certain amount of money. Overall, they were still in the red because the scale of investment was far larger, but they still had previously earned funds, so a game development team would not be a problem.
But I don’t really feel like making it exactly the same.
Diablo was such a successful work and so important in gaming history that it had been analyzed thoroughly. Simply reproducing it would give the game a fairly high chance of success.
But actually making the exact same thing did not motivate him. It was not because copying it bothered him morally. It simply did not excite him.
If Insu were poor, or if this were right after he awakened his memories of his previous life, that might be one thing. But now, he already held enough success and money in his hands.
To begin with, he had experienced the supernatural event of gaining a new life after death.
That did not mean he had become some immortal sage completely detached from money, but in this life, he had decided to do more of what he wanted and was running toward a grand dream. His values had shifted toward ideals rather than survival or reality.
If all he wanted was money, then with his knowledge of the future, he did not necessarily need to choose game development. He could have done another business. Of course, because he knew a lot about games and was interested in them, it was one of the choices with a high chance of success.
Insu launched a word processor and began planning.
First, I’ll keep the structure the same.
He disliked copying the whole thing, but wanting to make something similar after seeing something cool was also a very normal feeling, so he did not feel much resistance to following the overall game structure.
To begin with, in games, people almost never called it plagiarism just because a genre and structure were followed. Even Diablo itself later produced a flood of similar games, and something like Path of Exile was so similar that it was even called a spiritual successor. But there were not many people who criticized it for that.
(Translator’s Note: Path of Exile — A 2013 action RPG heavily inspired by Diablo II and often described as one of Diablo’s spiritual successors.)
However, following the story and setting exactly did bother him.
That really would feel like copying.
And Insu had only played Diablo starting from Diablo 2, and he had not explored it that deeply, so he only remembered things roughly. If he tried to follow it exactly with such vague memories, there was a high chance the result would become clumsy instead.
Demons, huh...
In truth, the setting of slaughtering demons was not especially original. Perhaps Diablo itself had followed Doom, which came out a few years earlier. At the time, Doom was the superstar of the PC game world.
And while Diablo was certainly a masterpiece, it was hard to say its setting, story, and characters were especially outstanding.
Though its clichéd worldbuilding and simple story actually suited its popular, intuitive systems and gameplay better, so it’s hard to call that a weakness.
In any case, that also meant it would be fine even if Insu did not have any special talent in that kind of setting and story work, and even if he did not spend a long time polishing those parts.
Should I lean a little toward SF?
Enemies that could be swept away without hesitation did not have to be demons. And supernatural materials like demons were not necessarily opposed to SF either.
Doom, which seemed to have influenced Diablo, also began on Mars’s moon and told a story about entering hell and tearing demons apart with guns.
Instead of demons, there are things like zombies too.
Zombies were occult material, yet their backgrounds were often modern or near-future. And zombies were a very useful subject for hack and slash.
First, they were humanoid, so it was easy to immerse them as enemies. In modern society, humanity’s enemy was ultimately humanity itself. There were things like war too, but most of the stress accumulated in ordinary life came from other humans, such as annoying bosses, rude customers, gangsters, and unpleasant friends.
Because of that, zombies could become targets for unconsciously accumulated anger and hostility. At the same time, in most standard settings, once someone became a zombie, they could not be restored, lost all intelligence and humanity, and became monsters who killed and devoured people.
Rather than somewhat abstract concepts like demons, zombies were enemies people could kill even more directly and without hesitation. Zombies were also usually already dead, so they kindly removed even the reluctance toward killing.
Come to think of it, Diablo had quite a lot of zombies too. Similar things like skeletons and ghouls as well.
Zombies could also be mass-produced, were stupid, and had a slow image, making them ideal targets to sweep away easily. In other words, they were perfectly suited to Diablo’s hack-and-slash system.
(Translator’s Notes: Hack-and-Slash — A game style focused on repeatedly fighting large numbers of enemies, gaining loot, and improving character strength through combat.)
SF with masses of zombie-like enemies.
Insu instantly thought of a plausible setting.
It was not orthodox SF, but something that mixed SF with religion and horror.
Zombies would be the main material, but even though it had an SF background, he decided to include cultists by giving it occult attributes rather than using viruses or alien monster infection.
Should I start with a world where democracy has collapsed, communist dictatorships and feudal dictatorships have spread, and social contradictions have accumulated again from there?
It would begin with a religion appearing in a dystopian world tormented by even corporate states.
At first, the ruling class and intellectuals would not think much of it. After all, historically, when social contradictions worsened, religions appeared to help people forget suffering. That was a natural flow.
But this religion was strange. Rumors spread that it actually performed miracles, and after rapidly expanding its influence, it soon launched a rebellion.
In truth, rebellion was not easy in a highly developed dystopian world like this. Weapons were extremely powerful, and with the development of robots and artificial intelligence, a small number of people monopolized that armed power.
But this religion allowed bare-handed humans to fight such highly advanced weapons.
Like the end-times religions that appeared in China, such as Taiping Dao, known as the Yellow Turbans, the White Lotus Society at the end of the Yuan dynasty, or the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The difference between those historical religions and the religion appearing now was that this one truly displayed such power.
(Translator’s Note: White Lotus Society — A religious movement involved in multiple rebellions in Chinese history, including unrest around the late Yuan period.)
(Translator’s Note: Taiping Heavenly Kingdom — A 19th-century religious rebel state in China that fought the Qing dynasty during the Taiping Rebellion.)
However, this ability was not perfect. There was no way they could take a direct hit from powerful lasers or railguns and remain fine. But they showed durability that was difficult to believe belonged to ordinary humans, and even after suffering such severe damage, they charged forward without fear.
Like monsters that had lost all reason.
In that way, several planets fell into the hands of this religion in an instant.
But this rebellion did not become a revolution and end with liberation from the ruling class. Instead of establishing a new government, the religion’s leaders began committing massacres.
And these massacres were not calculated killings meant to purge opposition forces, but indiscriminate madness.
I can add descriptions of how people died and how the dead rose again to kill others.
Then, after creating planets filled with hundreds of millions or even billions of zombies, monsters created or summoned by the cult’s power, and cultists, he would set up the people who would resolve it.
In a classical approach, he could introduce righteous beings opposed to the cult, but that felt too stale. It might also feel unrealistic and contrived, making immersion difficult.
By modern standards, it would be better to analyze the cultists’ power, create artificial humans or similar beings capable of producing special powers, and arm them with cutting-edge scientific weapons, right?
Gunpowder or optical weapons would probably be easier for the public to accept than magic.
Of course, people familiar with games would not find the concept of magic unfamiliar, but to newcomers who had only just started using computers and playing games, it could feel awkward.
Moreover, in the Western market at this time, SF was far more popular than fantasy. Fantasy only truly began becoming popular after Harry Potter. Even then, one could say it was after the film adaptations rather than the novels. And sword-and-magic fantasy of the kind mainly used in games only came after The Lord of the Rings was adapted into films, so from 2001 onward.
For characters, artificial humans, psychics, androids, cyborgs, and things like that should work.
He did not intend to give characters personal narratives like in Japanese RPGs. That was partly because of the characteristics of Western RPGs, but also because he wanted players to be able to play various characters.
If he gave each character a name and personal story, he would need to create separate stories for each one. In a game fundamentally focused on action and character growth, overinvesting in that side was not rational.
Theoretically, he could make a perfect game with both good characters and story and excellent gameplay, but development always happened in reality.
Moreover, compared to Diablo’s release date in his previous life, he was already considerably late. He did not want a similar game to appear first and hear people call his game a derivative work.
And if I use the setting that they analyzed the cultists’ power, I can add depth by having them become contaminated and corrupted because they used something they didn’t fully understand.
This was one of the fairly familiar themes in the West.
The roots probably lay in distrust and fear of science and technology caused by unexpected, deadly environmental pollution from things like radioactive contamination, Freon gas, and fuel additives. Because of that, there were many settings where using poorly understood forces led to major problems.
Of course, similar narratives also existed in myth and religion even before scientific thought, but those were meant to speak about faith and obedience, while the former differed in that it was a lesson learned from real accidents.
In that way, Insu continued planning a new game to replace Diablo.
TLF Online continued its service stably without any special problems.
This was partly because Parallel Soft’s development team was struggling with all their might, but the massive investment played a major role. No matter how hard they worked, service quality inevitably had limits if the physical environment did not support it.
“Cooperation with AOL would be impossible, right?”
“Probably.”
Hyein answered Insu’s words with a bitter smile.
Physical infrastructure investment included servers, but lines were also important. They had chosen to operate their own servers, but unlike that, it was difficult for Parallel Soft to install its own lines.
First, since physical installation was required, it needed manpower, facilities, and technical know-how. There was no way Parallel Soft had those things.
Moreover, even if they somehow installed dedicated lines, unless they wanted to do something that only benefited others, they would have to operate an ISP and collect internet usage fees. That was even more impossible.
Establishing an ISP cost a great deal of money, required negotiations with the government, and above all, competition was already fierce. It did not seem like they could force their way in.
That meant the only option available was cooperating with an existing ISP.